Heroes for All Time. Dione Longley
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thirsting for fame, some for whiskey, and some for nothing but $11.00 per month.”1
Would this odd jumble—hundreds of thousands of untrained men led by a tiny percentage of West Point professionals—fight? “‘War,’ said a great statesman, ‘can only be successfully prosecuted when the army is well seasoned … the raw recruits who have responded to President Lincoln’s call will only hasten the downfall of the Republic by their inefficiency on the field.’”2
Untrained, yes; but Lincoln’s raw recruits were for the most part united in the cause and willing to give their lives for their country. A New Haven bookkeeper-turned-soldier put it simply: “The experiment was to be tried of … a war by citizen soldiers who left the desk, the farm and the workshop in answer to their country’s call.”3
Smooth-cheeked boys marched beside white-bearded grandfathers. A soldier in the 21st Connecticut wrote of their oldest member: “the boys wondered why the Army had sent them a Chaplain who was three times as old as most of them, 64. He could never in the world, they thought, stand the rigors of camp life, much less the stress of battle.”4
The 2nd Heavy Artillery’s “most unpromising officer,” wrote one of the men, “was First Lieutenant Augustus H. Fenn. He was but eighteen years old, of freckled face and awkward gait, and was regarded with surly contempt by windy and consequential brother officers. Every private soldier, too, had his fling at him. It was considered very impudent in him to be an officer, at all; but he had recruited his forty men, and there he was, with a commission in his pocket from Governor Buckingham.” (Theodore F. Vaill, History of the Second Connecticut Volunteer Heavy Artillery. Originally the Nineteenth Connecticut Vols., p. 334.)
Fenn’s company contained the men rejected by the officers of the other nine companies. But though young and inexperienced, Fenn was not a quitter. The regiment’s adjutant wrote that “Lieutenant Fenn grew in the estimation … of all who knew him … He proved himself one of the best drill masters and disciplinarians in the regiment, and one of the most competent officers in every position.” His company of disdained soldiers became “one of the best, most faithful, trusted Companies that ever went into the service.” (Ibid., p. 334.)
At the Battle of Cedar Creek, Fenn (then a captain) was wounded in the arm. Surgeons amputated it at the shoulder, and arranged for the young officer to be discharged from the army. Indignant, Fenn appealed to his colonel who allowed him to stay in the regiment. Less than seven weeks after his amputation, Captain Fenn returned to his troops at the front. By war’s end, Augustus Fenn, no longer the “most unpromising officer,” had been brevetted colonel. One-armed, he returned to his home in Plymouth, Connecticut. He went on to attend Harvard Law School, later becoming a respected judge in Connecticut.
Chaplain Thomas Brown, sixty-four, “won the respect and love of the entire regiment.”(Story of the 21st Regiment, Connecticut Volunteer Infantry During the Civil War, by members of the regiment, p. 127.)
Years after the war ended, Reverend Brown attended a regimental reunion, at which the veterans presented him with a gold-headed cane. “His deep emotions compelled him to make only a brief reply: ‘I don’t see what I have ever done that you boys love me so.’” (Carl F. Price, Postscripts to a Yankee Township, p. 156.)
But the 21st soldiers soon grew to love their chaplain, Rev. Thomas G. Brown of Chatham. He was a quiet, unpretentious man, “doing all that was possible for the physical, as well as the spiritual, well being of even the most humble man in the regiment.”5
In May of 1864, when the regiment went into battle at Drewry’s Bluff, its chaplain went in with them.
Our sturdy old chaplain, anxious to render practical aid, armed himself with an axe and found a short method of opening ammunition boxes, from which he distributed cartridges … Death was thinning our ranks and anon the good Chaplain … was beckoned to the side of a dying soldier …
And down on bended knees by the dying man’s side sank the fearless minister, and with bared head, looking up to Heaven, lifted his soul in prayer that God would receive the departing spirit. Meanwhile the air was alive with leaden hail, and the roar at times drowned the firmly spoken words of him that prayed.6
An unknown photographer captured the likenesses of two boys in Connecticut’s 2nd Heavy Artillery, who posed in their musicians’ uniforms. Dick Butler (left) was about thirteen and Henry VanDeusen about fifteen when they enlisted in December of 1863. For such youngsters, it must have seemed like a dream come true to join the army. Camping in tents, foregoing school and church, and being free from a parent’s oversight—what could be better? But along with adventure and freedom came responsibilities, deprivation, and danger. The drummer boys grew up fast—if they lived to grow up at all. Dick Butler and Henry VanDeusen survived the war.
In battle, musicians didn’t usually bear arms, but they still came under fire while working as stretcher-bearers for the wounded. The 2nd Heavies’ adjutant described what happened to one of their drummer boys at the Battle of Cold Harbor: “two men were carried to the rear, on stretchers, apparently in such a state of exhaustion that they could not stand … they were carried by some of the musicians,—whose duty it was to perform such work when fighting was going on—and placed in a ravine, about a mile to the rear; they had just arrived there when a rebel shell burst near the spot, taking off the foot of a drummer boy of Company E, named Frederick D. Painter.” (Vaill, History of the Second Connecticut Volunteer Heavy Artillery, p. 324.) The son of an itinerant minister, Frederick “Frank” Painter came from a large family. He was about fourteen when he enlisted. The shell at Cold Harbor killed him, and he was buried on the field. At the Battle of Winchester, another drummer in his regiment, James VanBuren, met the same fate.
“He was our father, we his boys,” wrote one of the 21st soldiers.7
At the other end of the spectrum from Chaplain Brown were the boy soldiers—and there were many. Fourteen- and fifteen-year-old boys (who claimed to be eighteen) enlisted throughout Connecticut. An old story claimed that boys often placed in one of their shoes a scrap of paper with the numeral eighteen written on it. When asked their age, they would reply truthfully that they were “over eighteen.” The doctors who examined the new soldiers often knew or suspected their deceptions, but were willing to look the other way.
Drummer boys were often a regiment’s youngest members. In the 2nd Heavy Artillery, Theodore Vaill mentioned “eight or ten boys, not more than thirteen or fifteen years of age, who had enlisted and come to the regiment with the rest of the recruits, as drummer boys.”8 At such a young age, the drummers probably didn’t enlist out of patriotic or moral sentiments, but from a yearning for adventure, or an innocent desire to be a soldier.
In between the young drummers and the old men were thousands and thousands of soldiers whose ages spanned decades. Some Connecticut families sent more than one generation: in Salisbury, fifteen-year-old Charlie Ball fought for the 2nd Heavy Artillery, while his father and his grandfather enlisted the 28th Regiment.
Elihu Moulthrop and his son Evelyn were among many father-son combinations in the Union army. Elihu was forty-four and Evelyn twenty-one when they enlisted in Connecticut’s 20th Regiment. In August of 1864, Evelyn was killed at Turner’s Ford, Georgia—not in battle, but in a peculiar mishap in camp. Evelyn had just come in off picket duty when a neighbor from Derby, Scott Baker, asked for his help. Baker had a musket ball stuck in his gun. Using a ball screw on the end of his ramrod, Baker had screwed it into the jammed bullet. He asked to borrow the strap from Evelyn’s knapsack to fasten to the ramrod. Baker said he intended to attach the strap’s other end to a tree,